500 GBs HD space required for stacking?

Software Siril
1

Hello, two questions for you all regarding registration and stacking multiple 130 GB avi files from PIPP.
1) If I start with a large MOV file, PIPP creates multiple AVI files, breaking into segments of 130 GBs. It seems Siril can only see 1 input AVI at a time. Is that accurate, or is there a way to ‘assemble’ or ‘select multiple AVIs’ to be registered and stacked together?
2) When I just select the first 130 GB AVI file, Siril says it requires nearly 500 GBs of HD capacity to register and then stack. I’m running Siril on a 1 TB M1 Mac laptop, and having that kind of free disk capacity available to process a single 2 minute planetary video capture is pretty extreme. I thought the SWAP file might recognize an external hard disk and save me from this requirement to have the primary hard drive available with 500 GBs free, but no luck. When I pointed to an external disk with 500 GBs free, Siril still wouldn’t let me move forward…

M1 MacBook Pro, 16 GBs RAM, 1 TB hard drive running Siril 99.8-1.

Thanks for your time!

2
  1. We chose to abandon films processing in Siril because it’s the wrong format for astronomy. We advocate for the use of the SER format instead. Yet, Siril is able to convert the film formats to SER, so you should be able to process your MOV or AVI files once converted to SER. And yes it is possible to merge SER files with Siril, in the conversion tab.
  2. Siril is not a planetary image processing tool, as it does not feature multi-point registration and stacking; the results will probably not be very good. The films formats that you use are 8 bit per pixel deep, Siril works internally with 16 or 32, because that’s what is required for deep-sky processing. Planetary registration methods do not create new images so no disk space is needed, stacking only needs the space for the result image. I suspect the preprocess step is what requires all the disk space. You should force Siril to use 16 bits instead of the default 32 in the preferences to cut that by a factor 2. The swap file is just for the undo feature, not for intermediate preprocessing files.